Social networks are a thing of the past. At least that’s true for the venture
capital funds deciding where to put their cash.

Facebook wannabes may have been the biggest magnets for investment a few years ago, but most technology funds have lately shifted their focus to a rather less glamourous sector: “big data”.

It may seem dull on the surface and in many ways it really is, but big data also crucially underpins the likes of Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, keeping them in business. Social media goes around collecting information about users and this new breed of companies sifts through it, identifying patterns, homing in on details – in short, turning it into something useful.

At the moment, a lot of the patterns are used to help advertisers target the people who are most likely to listen, or help salesmen to work out who will be most receptive to their patter. But big data is not all about identifying the best quarry. Information is mined to chart demographic changes, diseases and shifts in social behaviour.

There is also enormous untapped potential – especially when combined with another fad-sounding trend in technology. Silicon Valley’s newest wave of entrepreneurs is obsessing over “Quantified Self” (QS), a movement also known as life-logging, dedicated to cataloguing information about human behaviour.

At its simplest, QS means fitness bands, diet apps and sleep gizmos, logging how many steps you have walked that day, the number of calories consumed, or ensuring you wake up at the perfect moment in your REM cycle. In San Francisco, Fitbit has enjoyed considerable success with small, wearable devices that chart all of the above.

But QS is starting to become more complicated, tapping into a desire to do more than just automate the process of filling a spreadsheet.

Technologists are developing devices that capitalise on human nostalgia by cataloguing memories, preserving them for users’ private benefit, rather than for mere social networking currency.

In Cincinnati, a company called Kapture is developing a wearable band that will automatically record everything you hear, always retaining the most recent 60 seconds. Users who hear something they want to remember – a crucial disclosure, say, or the first utterances of a child – can hit a button to hold on to the latest segment.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, Memoto produces a small wearable camera that takes footage at random moments, automatically focusing on human faces and increasing the odds that the wearer will catch life’s unexpected – but treasured – events.

Not every QS gadget attaches itself to the user. GreenGoose, a San Francisco start-up, makes tiny motion sensors designed to be fixed to ordinary household objects. If the object is moved, it sends a wireless signal to a data station. It might be useful as a device for tracking lost keys, but it can also help to make a game of household chores, such as watering the plants, brushing one’s teeth or cooking.

Imagine QS technology that could track minute physical changes in someone’s blood flow, and administer medicine before the onset of a heart attack.

I may be getting a little sentimental now, but there is clearly a cold economic argument: America is bizarrely unperturbed by privacy concerns – just witness the recent PRISM debacle – and this gives Americans tremendous freedom. I question their sanity, on the one hand. On the other, this leaves them free to go at QS full throttle.

The tectonic plates of tech are shifting. Britain can sit back while the US dominates, just as it did on social networking and search. Or we can brush aside our reservations, accept the inexorable direction of travel, and use this new focus to create the global player we have never quite pulled off.

In the US, the size of your cubicle is everything

Office politics take on a whole new meaning in America. While most businesses in Britain have gone open-plan, US companies are curiously attached to private work spaces for every employee.

Many offices have old-fashioned cubicles, the bland partitions of which are theoretically designed to shut out distractions and help staff to concentrate.

I say “theoretically”. Actually, there is plenty of evidence to back this up. Earlier this year, researchers at North Carolina State University and Virginia State University found that people who work in open-plan offices are less satisfied with their work than their cubicled counterparts. They also have lower career aspirations and are more easily distracted.

Meanwhile, scientists in Scandinavia have found that open-plan workers take nearly two-thirds as much sick leave as those with their own enclosed spaces – perhaps because germs can get about the office, unimpeded, perhaps because the workers leap on the merest shred of an excuse to escape.

But forget academic papers. There are some upsides to open-plan working that vastly outweigh the downsides. People who can look their colleagues in the eye without having to call a meeting are more likely to forge office friendships, not to mention loyal ties to their employer.

I am a bit biased here – I have never heard of a newsroom that is not open-plan – but walls between workers are the death knell for business communication. Staff who overhear discussions can jump in and add their two-penneth – whether sales leads or new business ideas. Colleagues can get their points across in matters of seconds, without the hassle of diary invites or half-hour meetings that barely merit a few minutes.

At least one American agrees with me: when New York mayor Michael Bloomberg set up shop in City Hall, he planted himself among his staff, in a wall-free zone known as the “bull pen”. Workers dragged their heels at first, but many have since become zealots.

How were they so easily converted? I suspect that the scientific research overlooked one crucial fact: that many of those workers who were under-stimulated and dissatisfied were also further down the pecking order.

For that is the other aspect of office politics in America: do not be fooled, size matters.

However drab they may be, cubicle walls denote status. Real walls denote even more. And real walls enclosing a large corner office with a view? Well, we need a whole new scale.

Brits coming to work in the US for the first time are often baffled by the complex hierarchy. American companies may spend millions on reconfiguring offices to accommodate mid-tier staff, just to avoid having to put an executive of the wrong ranking in a plum corner office. Even in a city like New York, where top-end commercial rents are grazing $200 per sq ft, many businesses would prefer to reserve these suites for non-existent staff than make such a catastrophic error.

After all, this is the land where big equals rich, and rich equals powerful. Americans aren’t clinging to their cubicles because they love privacy – oh, no. They are clinging to their status.

Twitter's IPO could make or break the company

With a tweet, Twitter turned itself into the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Last week, it used its own micro-blogging service to announce to the world that it had filed for an initial public offering. It might have been a long time coming, but it still took people by surprise. Facebook’s botched IPO of 2011 poisoned the market for the entire technology sector, forcing dozens of burgeoning businesses to shelve their own flotation plans.

A year-and-a-half on, Twitter’s IPO stands to make or break their fortunes. Get it right, and it will have a halo effect on the rest of the technology sector, reassuring investors that we are not about to get caught by another dot.com bubble. Get it wrong, and the hoodied-ranks of Silicon Valley can watch their dreams of powerboats and trophy girlfriends gurgle down the drain. The tension is palpable.